Wow if I wasnt convinced before I am now. It seems the owners are going for the jugular.

Apart from the money issues I think the LBJ, Wade & Bosh move was a wakeup call for the small market owners and they are going to make sure it doesnt happen again and/or using the new system to force the NY & Miami teams to either divest of at least one of their max. players and with a cap make it only possible to have a mediocre cast around them (unless good players want to play for the minimum).

Wonder if the Gumble statements had any effect...I did not hear anyone from the union separate themselves from it.

A fundamental problem is that the players have no real leverage...no sustainable alternative sources of income and the owners know it alongwith public furor (except in Miami) about what the troika did. That was a bad for business move and Barkley had it right...the owners wont allow this. Someone mentioned that he has Jordan whispering into his ear so he probably has a good handle at the ownership positions.

I'm not slanting anything or splitting hairs. I said that right from the start.

I'm sorry but this reply:

GarbageTime wrote:

I'm talking specifics which is incredibly important when discussing these matters. Every business that is losing or making money is, in general, in the same situation. But not all business whether losing or making money are in the same circumstances.

to this statement:

Matt52 wrote:

I'm not sure what you are talking about but I'm talking about in general. A business or league losing money year in and year out is not sustainable. Period.

is splitting hairs. Losing more money than you make is not sustainable. Period.

I decided to erase that after I wrote it as my sarcasm was getting a bit much, even for me.

Luckily, I'm getting to the point of not caring. The views you offer are constantly changing throughout the discussion and are based on one reply to the next. There is no consistency in your message - much like the player's association.

you weren't event the one on strike? And employees being legally forced back to work by the government is such a different situation from players choosing to go back. Apples and Oranges my man.

And a % of $20 an hour is in no way similar to a % of 500k - 20 mil k a year.

Comparing hourly wages of the common person to annual wages of a pro athlete is ridiculous.

My point is 10% is 10% and the 10% for the common person, while not near the same amount, is much more important.

I'm simply going to chuckle at this statement. Atleast you aren't an accountant trying tell me its the players themselves who would be reading the owner's financial statements.

I am very rational. Now answer my question about what you expect the accountants to do and I'll take it from there.

yes so rational that you are telling me you don't feel any real evidence is necessary in order for you to provide an argument.

Telling me "but they don't HAVE TO do that" doesn't make it reasonable for them to make a statement they are unwilling to prove. More importantly, it doesn't make it reasonable for you to assume that statement is true, let alone pass off that information as the truth.

You never said accountants, you were talking about the PA.

hahaha... please you are stretching it. And when I talk about ownership do you assume I think the individual owners do their own financial statements to?

What do I expect accountants to do? Exactly what accountants do. Review and ensure the accuracy of financial statements and resource allocation.

But what are you expecting? A step by step 'how to' procedure? I'd hire an accountant to do that. But if you feel like working pro bono... be my guest.

Telling me "but they don't HAVE TO do that" doesn't make it reasonable for them to make a statement they are unwilling to prove. More importantly, it doesn't make it reasonable for you to assume that statement is true, let alone pass off that information as the truth.

It's a labour dispute, not a court hearing. "Evidence" is not needed. I gave you a very public example of the league's woes.

GarbageTime wrote:

What do I expect accountants to do? Exactly what accountants do. Review and ensure the accuracy of financial statements and resource allocation.

Investigate resource allocation? So what happens when they discover the league spent money on balls, plush hotel rooms for the players and fancy jets? What next? What do the accoutants do then?

It's a labour dispute, not a court hearing. "Evidence" is not needed. I gave you a very public example of the league's woes.

Investigate resource allocation? So what happens when they discover the league spent money on balls, plush hotel rooms for the players and fancy jets? What next? What do the accoutants do then?

ummm ok how about facts then? whatever you want to call it you have not been able to provide them because they have not been provided.

I don't know be reasonable about that resource allocation? And just off hand, how much of that is included under benifits which the owners pay for in their portion of the BRI? I'd bet an accountant could discover that.

ummm ok how about facts then? whatever you want to call it you have not been able to provide them because they have not been provided.

They don't have to(open the books) and they have no significant pressure to do so. Not to mention its not a common practice in labour negotiations. It's not like the league is bucking standard practices or anything. Also, as I mentioned already, there is a very well documented instance where the league needed to borrow $200M from JP Morgan so half the league could pay the bills. Also, I am pretty sure the league did give them something in the early proceedings but the union complained it wasn't detailed enough for their liking...

GarbageTime wrote:

I don't know be reasonable about that resource allocation?

What do you mean by reasonable? Who determines what is reasonable?

GarbageTime wrote:

And just off hand, how much of that is included under benifits which the owners pay for in their portion of the BRI? I'd bet an accountant could discover that.

They don't have to(open the books) and they have no significant pressure to do so. Not to mention its not a common practice in labour negotiations. It's not like the league is bucking standard practices or anything. Also, as I mentioned already, there is a very well documented instance where the league needed to borrow $200M from JP Morgan so half the league could pay the bills. Also, I am pretty sure the league did give them something in the early proceedings but the union complained it wasn't detailed enough for their liking...

again for the umptenth time... this has nothing to do with some sort of requirement. And its not 'standard practice' because most (although not all) unionized organizations/companies are either government or sell public shares... meaning their books are already open. Anyways all that is hardly relevant to this situation or more specifically to you trying to pass off theory as fact and avoid the issue.

And major corporations borrow money all the time short and long term to 'pay bills' and does not necessarily have anything to do with their ability to create a profit or loss, or meet their fiscal goals for the year/quarter (especially in this low interest rate environment). You'll find an enourmous number of business who borrow for each payroll (the NBA did this for years and may still be doing it), or a short term investment, or for the purchase of goods and serivces. Business, especially large businesses, do it all the time.

Does this mean the NBA wasn't in need of money? No. But it also doesn't mean they were or weren't profitable, or by how much.

What do you mean by reasonable? Who determines what is reasonable?

stop distracting.

You, as an 'accountant' should know exactly what 'reasonable' entails, as you SHOULD use it every day.

The very reason for system change - right here

Via New York Post via HoopsHype.com:

Anthony freely admitted yesterday how delighted he would be if Hornets point guard Chris Paul bolted the Big Easy for the Big Apple. Anthony has spent a lot of this summer hanging with Paul and even playing on his team during barnstorming exhibitions. "If it works out and he comes here and they allow him to come here, you'll see a smile from ear to ear," Anthony said during an appearance in Greenwich Village. "It's not just me. It's everybody [in New York]. If he decides to leave New Orleans and goes somewhere else, they'll be feeling the same way I'm feeling.

So three players who have been franchise players in the last 2 years could now be on one team?

No wonder 'hardline' owners are dead set on systemic changes.

No wonder 'hardline' owners are against the talent drain from around the league to select markets.

It is also interesting that 2 'hardline' owners are Paul Allen and Peter Holt. One with deep pockets and the other the owner of the best run teams in the league for 15 years.

The NBA owners have always said that they want two things from a new CBA: To adjust player salaries so that owners stop losing money, and to change some other aspects of the league’s financial underpinnings to make the league more competitive, entertaining and successful.

As the stakes get higher and higher the case behind that second part gets weaker and weaker.

“We think the data is clear,” deputy commissioner Adam Silver said in Thursday's news conference announcing the end of this attempt at mediation. “I know we've had lots of back and forth with people in this room, but we think that a team that spends $100 million on its payroll versus a team that spends $50 million is at a huge competitive advantage. It's not a perfect one-to-one correlation, but there's a huge competitive advantage that comes from the ability to spend more money. And there's a reason we believe why the NFL has been so successful from a competitive standpoint with a hard cap and a reason that the NHL has been so successful from a competitive standpoint with their flex cap-type system, which has a hard, absolute cap at the top of the band.”

That little line about “back and forth with people in this room” he said with a glance at me, and by no accident. I have been vigorously pursuing this concept with the league and others from the moment I first learned of it. I’ve talked to every expert they’ve ever mentioned on or off the record, as well as independent authorities.

And the more I dig, the more startling it is how thin the evidence is to support the league’s assertion that they can spread hope around the league with financial tricks. Limiting how much the Los Angeles Lakers can spend might sound like a good way to make the Sacramento Kings better, but I'm not sure it works that way.

Good teams generally spend
I accept that there is correlation between payroll and winning. There are plenty of exceptions -- for instance, the team with the best record last season, the Chicago Bulls, had a bottom-five payroll. But the fact is that payrolls on teams deep in the playoffs tend to be high and payrolls on teams in the lottery tend to be low.

The NBA is torching this season in no small part on the bet that there is not just correlation but causation. As in, that spending causes winning, and that if low-spending teams could spend more, they’d win more.

Think about bad NBA teams, though. The playbook is as old as the hills. If you don’t have good players, you trade away all the big contracts, hoard draft picks and cheap young players, then spend as little as possible to preserve cap space in case good players come along.

In other words, we all know that when your team is bad, you stop spending.

And the opposite is true. When the Cleveland Cavaliers had LeBron James, they spent like crazy to surround him with talent because that was their time. Small-market teams poised to win almost always pay. This is not like baseball, in which the poor teams can’t afford to keep the studs. San Antonio, Orlando, Salt Lake (Utah), New Orleans, Memphis … there is no NBA market so small it wouldn’t jump at the chance to pay a real-deal superstar.

Where's the precedent?

Especially devastating to the league’s case is that it has never worked before in any major way. I have pressed the league’s leading experts on this for evidence that a hard cap has ever improved competitive balance anywhere on the globe. The NHL recently instituted a hard cap, and but for a passing comment from Peter Holt on Thursday, it’s impossible to find anyone even at NBA headquarters who thinks that serves as a strong example.

They're similarly unable to come up with a better one.

There is a widely accepted -- even by both sides of this debate -- measure of a league’s competitive balance called Noll-Scully. The NFL has always had a great Noll-Scully score -- which has not changed noticeably with changes in the NFL’s cap.

In other words, this both defies a casual observer’s sense of how the league normally works, and has never worked convincingly in any other league.

In a recent paper, researchers David Berri and Martin Schmidt review the entire history of major professional sports in America, and all of the measures any leagues have ever taken to improve competitive balance. They did not find that any “institutional changes” made leagues more competitive (what changes there have been to parity in leagues they trace to other factors).

Schmidt and Berri aren’t outliers among economists either. Worth noting that the “Noll” in “Noll-Scully” is respected Stanford economist Roger Noll, who has written extensively about the competitiveness of leagues, and the anti-competitive effect of salary caps. Noll has testified against the NBA on the issue of salary caps in the past.

Who doesn’t love the idea of a league riddled with close games? All kinds of teams in the playoff hunt? I’m enthralled by it too. I have even had it explained to me how such a thing would have a dramatic effect on TV ratings and the popularity of the league. With the right system changes, I’ve heard, the league could be so much more popular that 50 percent of new BRI (basketball related income) could be worth more than 57 percent under the old system. These tweaks could be worth billions!
If that's so, why not get those billions with a much better solution?

If you're serious about competitive balance

Let star players earn way more. That's the solution. The Lakers are routinely used as the example of a team that outspends rivals. If Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in their primes could both have earned their worth, not even the mighty Lakers would have been able to afford them both, and they would have made two teams really good instead of one team a three-time champion.

If the current Miami Heat were allowed to pay Dwyane Wade $50 million a year, they would have started that years ago -- and they’d never have had the cap room to lure LeBron James and Chris Bosh.

That’s a system that would really do what matters to make the league more competitive. It moves the stars around, which is the only reliable way to move the wins around.

There’s no risk of total salaries going crazy -- both sides agree players will continue to share a pool of league revenues, and both sides agree to salary caps and some kind of luxury tax.

But the league doesn't pursue this, of course, because owners like capping maximum salaries. (The union doesn’t push on this issue either, because if stars earned more that would hurt their bread-and-butter, the NBA’s middle class.)

Instead, the league asks us all to celebrate competitive balance -- so long as the pain of creating it is felt primarily by the players. When owners could do something real to make the league more competitive, like change the playoff format or pay Chris Paul far more on the open market, they lose interest.

Seems fishy to me, but I'm not the one they have to convince.

What does Billy Hunter think of the NBA's efforts to improve competitive balance? Is he excited to reap its rewards? Hardly.

"I think," he said Thursday, "it’s all about putting money in their pocket."

Last edited by Joey; Fri Oct 21st, 2011 at 09:01 AM.

"That was Nasty right? Cocked that Joint back and banged on 'em." -James Johnson

What will happen to Chicago's payroll once Derrick Rose goes off his rookie deal and, to a much lesser extent, Taj Gibson?

The issue is not NO, ORL, UTA, MEM paying stars, the issue is stars are packing up to join other stars.

An open system is opposed just as much by the owners as it is by the Derek Fisher's and Maurice Evans of the league. The players association's position has always been to protect the middle contract guys. I, for one, am in full agreement superstars should be ticked at owners AND other player's for limiting their salaries.

I do not think the owners position is about spending, it is about retaining talent. Look at Carmelo Anthony already publicly trying to woo Chris Paul to New York. The players are not interested in competitive balance.

again for the umptenth time... this has nothing to do with some sort of requirement. And its not 'standard practice' because most (although not all) unionized organizations/companies are either government or sell public shares... meaning their books are already open. Anyways all that is hardly relevant to this situation or more specifically to you trying to pass off theory as fact and avoid the issue.

You're the only one espousing theory without any facts, GT.

Can you explain to us why you are the only one clamouring for the league's financial statements? As Apollo notes, the union asked for them a long time ago, and received something from the league that they deemed insufficient. And that ended the discussion. If there was significant concern over the league's claims of losses, don't you think the union would still be pursuing that angle?

Get real, man -- if you want to continue discussing this stuff, you need to check your facts yourself first, and come up with a truly rational argument as to why you think the players deserve a specific percentage of BRI, and deserve a say in the system issues that are causing the owners' grief. Whether the owners' grief is related to a lessening of their profit margin or to competitive imbalance is immaterial -- it only has a bearing on public opinion, not on the negotiations themselves.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

So three players who have been franchise players in the last 2 years could now be on one team?

No wonder 'hardline' owners are dead set on systemic changes.

No wonder 'hardline' owners are against the talent drain from around the league to select markets.

It is also interesting that 2 'hardline' owners are Paul Allen and Peter Holt. One with deep pockets and the other the owner of the best run teams in the league for 15 years.

Melo is a me-first player of the first order. This is like buying a championship and throwing the whole team in NO under the bus. It's also about getting more endorsements and better stats. It wouldnt surprise me in the least that if CP joined up and had better on court chemistry with Amare that Melo would pout and then trouble in paradise.

Melo is a me-first player of the first order. This is like buying a championship and throwing the whole team in NO under the bus. It's also about getting more endorsements and better stats. It wouldnt surprise me in the least that if CP joined up and had better on court chemistry with Amare that Melo would pout and then trouble in paradise.

The system is broken. It has to change.

The league needs more players like KD and Tim Duncan... who are loyal, appreciate what has been given to them, and trust their team to build a contender around them. Dudes who take pride in what has been given to them.. One of the many reasons Durant is probably my favourite player outside of Toronto. That, and he is one of the last remaining remnants of my beloved Sonics

Can you explain to us why you are the only one clamouring for the league's financial statements? As Apollo notes, the union asked for them a long time ago, and received something from the league that they deemed insufficient. And that ended the discussion. If there was significant concern over the league's claims of losses, don't you think the union would still be pursuing that angle?

Get real, man -- if you want to continue discussing this stuff, you need to check your facts yourself first, and come up with a truly rational argument as to why you think the players deserve a specific percentage of BRI, and deserve a say in the system issues that are causing the owners' grief. Whether the owners' grief is related to a lessening of their profit margin or to competitive imbalance is immaterial -- it only has a bearing on public opinion, not on the negotiations themselves.

The players disagreed with the accounting methods versus the numbers. From what I recall, the biggest issue they had was teams should not include interest on the cost of buying a franchise. Excluding this number decreased the losses from the $300M neighbourhood to $120M. The players do not dispute the league is losing money.

My view is that is B.S. If I buy a rental property, the cost of interest on the loan is an expense of operating a rental property. Another poster called me and my example as small time or small potatoes or something along those lines (which is true) however the fact still remains the cost of borrowing to earn a profit is tax deductible - and rightfully so. Also if a team is operating in the red, they must be borrowing money to cover those costs - again that interest is also deductible.

The players position is very confusing. They are calling out ownership for being greedy and not negotiating in good faith while espousing how much money they are giving back. The money they are giving back is considerable - do not get me wrong. However, the real issue is the system. The players want guaranteed contracts, they want to continue with 'have' teams versus 'have not' teams, they want to continue having the opportunity to get max dollars in the city of their choosing, they want to continue having the opportunity to play GM in summer league games and at the Olympics. They defend their position without ever hitting on these issues.

I was worried for a while that the owners would not make the dramatic changes needed as they were bargaining on the MLE and negotiating a more strict luxury tax system. While this current scenario causes maximum pain for all participants and now that they have come this far, wait the players out and put in an NHL style flex cap system.